Bears

This one I’ve never heard

but I remember the old mountain story

about the woman who is tricked

and hands her baby over the fence

to a bear, who she thinks is her husband…

and I have dreams about bears

they change into people and change back

I change into a bear and change back

I sit in a tree and sing to one

until fierceness turns docile

like a puppy

and, god, I miss those mountains

It’s a pain in my throat and the only place

that causes me to cry when I see it and when I don’t.

So we’re all kin and we’ve all married

our kin and we continue to find them,

we continue to look for their twinkling eyes

in the hills of every place.

One may come lumbering out of a cave

give itself shape apart from the trees

and look like me and feel like me

and like the polar bear be the loneliest

--that’s because he hasn’t got any mountains.

Why do I miss it? The thing I’ve never had?

It was a distant backdrop to my childhood dramas

but a visit is a visitation

the place where mist is at dawn

where I fished on the Shenandoah

where morning glories dot even the sun.

Stories of bears reside in my flesh

what is commonplace there

becomes extraordinary elsewhere.

Aunt Han Ran may have used a broom

to chase that bear off her back porch,

I’ll invite him in to sit by the fire

dust the snow from his fur

and ask for all the things he knows.

I’ll bid him stay till spring

he may tell me where the treasure is hid

or what enchantment he is in.

I am close in nature and nature

is close inside me. Woods and Mountains

become my house and call me.

If I don’t have you covering me

I dream of bears and an ancient wooden door

and my Daddy calls to tell me mountain lore.

© Linda Suddarth, 2001

"Bears" was published in Alchemy on Sunday, Lit. journal. 

pub. through Pacifica Grad.Institute, 2001

"Mosquito and Mishka"
from Wikimedia Commons